Tutankhamen's Spirit Not Worried Over 'Grave Robbers' Says Doyle

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

Tutankhamen's Spirit Not Worried Over 'Grave Robbers' Says Doyle is an article published in The St. Louis Star on 18 february 1923.


Tutankhamen's Spirit Not Worried Over 'Grave Robbers' Says Doyle

The St. Louis Star (18 february 1923, p. 2)

Author Holds Excavations Disgraceful and Sacriligous — Declares Mummy's Soul Is Peaceful, Perhaps in Another Planet.

Copyright 1923. by International News Service.

London, Feb. 17. — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous novelist and noted authority on spiritism, today denounced as "grave-robbing foreigners" the explorers who have penetrated the 3,000-year-old tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt, but declared that the disturbance of the dead did not cause any anguish on the part of the spirit.

Tutankahmen's spirit, which departed the body about 1,500 years before Christ, is not near the scene and is not interested in the opinion of Sir Arthur. It is perhaps on some other planet and knows nothing of the investigations of the Egyptologists about the gold and linen-wrapped mummy.

Sir Arthur scoffed at the suggestion that it might be possible to "interview" Tutankhamen's spirit for ethereal views upon the removal of the mummified body.

"Tutankhamen's spirit left his body so many years ago that I expect he has forgotten he ever had such a thing as a body," said Sir Arthur. "Or, at all events, the spirit departed so long ago he has ceased to worry about the body. People have asked me if I or my mediumistic friends have had communication with the spirit of Tutankhamen. They either must be mad or think me mad. Tutankhamen's spirit is probably far away on some other planet, or perhaps on this one.

"The remains which they ghoulishly dug up at Luxor are not more to him than a discarded overcoat. In his mortal life, poor, old Tutankhamen wanted his earthly remains and treasures kept sacred, so he had them consecrated and sealed up is his tomb.

"It is a sacrilege to dig them up. They ought to be allowed to rest where he ordered them, not be placed in a museum on a slab for prying sacrilegious eyes. I think it is disgraceful and many others think the same thing.

"So far as the old king's body is concerned, it ought to be reinterred. Let grave-robbing foreigners continue their investigations toward more useful ends."